For my Computer class.

Read this article from the Washington Post

Write a comment to this posting about one or more of the following:

1)  How do you feel about the government using FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and other social web sites to find information about criminals?

2)  How would you feel if someone "friended" you, and you found out later that it was a lawyer investigating you, your parents, your friends or your friends' parents?

3) Do you think it's ok for people to create fake FaceBook/MySpace identities?

Remember in your reply, to follow the good writing guidelines (Topic, Evidence, Discussion).  This should be 2 or 3 paragraphs long.

Mr. Moccia

Wikis 2.0

For anyone working on a class wiki, I found a couple that have great tools and widgets to add to your wikis.

Try these:
gettingtrickywithwikis.wikispaces.com

And

cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com

Give 'em a try for customization.

OK Go's Rube Goldberg Machine

I saw a tweet from Adam Savage referring to this video.  When I saw it, I had to post for all geeks.

Thing 23 - The Reflection

So I made it through all 23 things, and there's a part of me that wishes there were 23 more.... I know there's a lot more out there that would greatly enhance our use of the web in school, and I bet that most of it is free. 

As with most people I'll take parts of this as helpful (wikis, blogs, Zoho), and discard others (RSS feeds), but I realize the whole purpose of this is a chance to sample parts of Web 2.0, that I really hadn't bothered looking a lot into.

When I signed up for the class, I didn't know what to expect, and when we met with Kathy at Covert, I looked at the list and saw that I had heard of about 18 of the 23 things, and used/done 8 of the 23 (none of the blogging, but my wife had done all the blogging stuff to document everything we ahd been through with my son's therapies).  I figured I'd see what was new, and what I could expand on, and maybe along the way, I could even teach a little too.  I hope I did that.

As with everyone, there is a share of frustration.  I understand Waterford's problems with streaming videos.  The pipes are only so big, and only so much information can flow through them.  There is lots of free web out there, and so much we wish we could do with our students.  We need someone out there who is willing to take the chances with classes to see how things work, and someone who will teach the other teachers about their trials & tribulations.

I actually (surprisingly) enjoy doing this blog.  Yeah, I know it shocks me too.   I wish that there had been more interactions between the blogs, so that we could cross pollinate (*oh my!*) between each and build more off of each other's blogs.  There was one thing about commenting on someone else' blog, but it should have been a continuing experience.  Like comment on one different person's blog with each THING you did.  This way we would be more encouraged to view each other's blog.  But the problem with blogs is that you don't feel like continuing if there is no audience.  Kind of like preforming to an empty house.  I will probably continue this blog to document things I try, as well as any new ed tech I might discover along the way.  If it seems like no one is watching, I'll probably let it die a natural death, because, you know, what's the point.  But if there are a couple of people out there who might be interested (and leave comments... comments let you know you care), then I'll keep it going.  We'll see how it goes.

Things 21/22 - Wikis

I had heard of wikis (well other than Wikipedia) for teachers' use over this past summer and thought they sounded cool.  I had a decent plan (I thought) of how to implement, but it was an unmitigated disaster.

I created my wiki (mistermoccia.wikispaces.com), and started building a framework.  One pgae for a home page, and then one for each unit that we study in 8th grade.  I figured out how to bulk upload students as members of the wiki, so they had editing privileges (through an Excel spreadsheet).  I had a plan to rotate each of my 4 classes through the computer lab so that each class would be in twice per parking period, and so that each could make a weekly edit, to put in the information we learned during the week. 

Well, the problem ended up being that what one student would edit, someone else (usually simultaneously) would edait as well, and everything kinda blew up.  I realize now that I didn't give enough guidance to make it work (mostly, because I didn't know about the need), as well, as the fact that, at first, 90% of the kids were more interested in the prettiness factor, rather than the content.

I *will* tell everyone though, that with this tool it is very easy to tell who made what changes.  You can set it up to get an email whenever someone changes things.  As long as you keep a list of whose username belongs to what student (because they can change their usernames), you are in good shape.  It will also tell who undoes a previous change.

I think that, for the end of the year, I might revisit the wiki as a review strategy before the final, or at least before our final project.  Students will need some central repository of terms & vocabulary and the wiki could be very powerful.

I see this as potentially being the most powerful tool in our arsenal for communication.  A wiki could work easily as a class webpage (if the teacher is the only one with editing privilege), but in terms of student creation, whis could be fantastic.  It would be much easier for a teacher with 30 students, rather than me with 125, but I'll continue trying to work my way through the issues.

Thing 19 & 20- Podcasts

I've *loved* podcasts for the last 3 - 4 years.  Since I've gotten older, I've become a big talk radio person, mostly due to sports.  Sadly, the commercials drive me nuts.  The other side that's bugged me is that I grew up in CIncinnati, so am an out-of-town sports fan, and after a while Detroit sports talk wasn't doing it for me.  When WDFN died a couple of years ago, I totally have ignored the radio in my car in favor of my iPod.  When it's just me in the car, I pretty much only listen to podcasts.

The ones I listen to fall under a couple of categories...
Sports
  1)  Cincinnati Sports podcast - no ads - depending on the season, usually updated every other week
  2)  ESPN - Around the Horn & PTI (these are audio versions of the TV shows on ESPN) - 1 ad at the beginning - updated daily
  3)  The BS Report - a podcast by Bill Simmons, an ESPN columnist - 1 ad at the beginning - updated 2 - 3 times a week

Tech - there is *only* one... called TWiT.  This Week in Tech.  Leo LaPorte is a former TechTV guy who used to have a radio show.  His podcast is fantastic, and most of the new stuff I've learned about technology (like Google Docs, and cloud computing), I've learned from the TWiT podcast.  4 commercials in a 2 hr podcast. Updated weekly

News/Sports - The Tony Kornheiser Show...  A Washington DC radio show with a nice mix of news, entertainment & sports - no ads - updated daily

Entertainment - Movies You Should See - A British podcast discussing a movie each week.  Very funny, fairly explicit, and some nice discussions. 1 ad at the beginning.  Besides, everything is better with a British accent.

And last, I found this one this past summer.  (If you prefer to save it to listen to later, here's the link.  It's after the interview).  It has several segments, but the first is MythBuster Adam Savage talking about his way to improve science education... Given money and time, it sounds perfect :-)  I also learned about a couple of other potential applications (including the Smart Pen) that have interesting possibilities in the classroom.  Kathy, what are the chances we can get the social networking thing (ELGG.. it's free!!)  in the district? 

Thing 18 SlideShare

Fairly cool...  even better if we can grab it at school.  Here's one I might use a little later in my next unit about foorces & motion.

Force & Motion

View more presentations from jshinkle.

OK... answers one question... can't access from school :-( 

Oh yeah.. You Tube.

I did realize that I had skipped the YouTube section of the 23 Things due to frustration from not being able to use it at school, so I'd better get back to it. 

I already have a group of videos that I had students make with MovieMaker.  They were told to just create a video... pretty vague instructions, so I could get maximum creativity.  After talking with Kathy (fairly far along the process), I realized that I couldn't post videos that have student last names, and many of the better ones had the students' full name attached. 

Anyway, if you look up the "author" (I wasn't really the author), MrMoccia42, you will see some of the videos my students created (my class is mostly male, and so you get the kind of movies boys will make... I make no apologies for their creations).  In the meantime, here are two of my favorite YouTube videos....

#1 Anything with Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem rocks


#2 Imagine Pixar meets Stephen King

Thing 17 Zoho SlideShow

I guess what all this comes down to ultimately, when it comes to trying something for the classroom is just trying it in the classroom.  While I teach 4 sections of science, what with all the benchmarks, it feels like there is no time to experiment with technology during class time.  I also, however, have an elective class that (for better or worse) where I pretty much have free play to teach my students about a variety of technology topics.  I'm thinking that I might do some re-vamping of this class, and start using it as much for my benefit as for the kids. 

Using Zoho slideshow will be an excellent opportunity for students who don't have MS OFfice to create slideshows for many different classes.  It doesn't allow for buttons that go to different slides (that I could tell) in order to make a Jeopardy-style review quiz, but the collaboration aspect might make up for it.  For my benefit, I need to learn how to answer the questions about "How can you tell who does what?" and this class seems to give me the opportunity to do this.

Wish me luck.

Google Docs

In the interest of full disclosure, I've been using Google Docs since about the beginning of the school year.  I had heard of it on one of my favorite podcasts (more info forthcoming during the podcast section of our programming), and saw a good deal of the potential. 

I haven't so much used it for student collaboration, since I have the usual questions about how can you tell when someone changes someone else's work.  However I have used it to post notes on line.  I've taken the notes that we create with the Smart Pen, turn them into a PDF file with the software that's included, then upload them to Google Docs.  I've figured out how to share this with everyone, then get the address to link to. 

This leads me to the next "Thing" (18.5?) that our 23 things doesn't mention.  It's a website called bit.ly.  This a website that shortens web addresses.  I took the Google Doc address, shortened it on bit.ly, rhen put the new address on my Twitter account.

An example that I used this for...  I have my students create a booklet of an element that they chose at random (together we all create a gigantic periodic table).  I created a rough draft on Powerpoint, then uploaded the rough draft to Google Docs.  It looks something like this... Google address: http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0Aax5ynhBN1u9ZGd6ejlwejJfNThmemYyNTZkdw&hl=en ;    bit.ly address: bit.ly/HJvkw ;   .  I copied the bit.ly address to my Twitter account, then when we were in the computer lab, I just told the students to go to my Twitter feed and click on the address, then they could get going.  My future version of this (I think) is to make some sort of interactive Periodic Table with this, and link them all from a wiki maybe?

Things 13 - 15

OK...  I kinda like Delicious, just for being able to access my favorite websites anywhere.  That makes it pretty handy, if I just remember to use it (unfortunately, by now all the computers I'm likely to use already have the websites favorited... or at least easily accessed by just typing the first few letters in). 

I can sort of see the benefits of the RSS feed, but we're getting to the point of information overload, I think.  Maybe I'm getting into the "old fart" stage, where I like my way of doing things, and I'm not seeing how the new way is better, but I'm not seeing how the RSS feeds are a big improvement over just checking my favorites periodically.  Maybe if I was on a Blackberry and constantly checking for updates, but when you only need to check a couple of times a day, I guess it just doesn't work for me.

Thing 12

I decided to add a widget for one of my favorite geek shopping sites Think Geek.  Yes, I know that it is free advertising, but it is a fun site, with great geeky T-shirts, and other things (USB missile command center anyone?, or maybe a blue laser pointer for the height of cool).  The widgets that are included as part of Blogspot are quick an easy to add, but going outside these gadgets is considerably harder, especially to fit them in an aesthetically pleasing way (yeah, still not happy with my set up, but I don't know enough html to fix it... just enough to be dangerous).

Oh well.. there it is, enjoy.
OK...so I figured out that the widget itself doesn't work quite right...  If you click on the item, it sends itself through an infinite loop and can't ever quite make it to the ThinkGeek website. **sigh** 

Thing 11

Posting comments... I've posted a couple... and I enjoy (through my cynical side) reading the comments on newspaper articles, mostly due to the stupidity of people who generally leave comments (not everybody, but lots). 

I prefer leaving my comments few & far between because 1) I still prefer to be a fairly anonymous person, and 2) I usually don't have that much that's intelligent to add.

On my own blog, it's pretty cool seeing comments, because it feels like I helped someone, and that part is cool.

Videos or "How to work around the streaming thing"

OK, we all have had the frustration of finding  a cool video on YouTube, or Google video, and realized, "Well, heck, what's the point, I can't show it at school anyway." :-(  There *is* a workaround that has worked fairly successfully for me, and it's fairly quick and painless.

It's called YouTube Downloader.

It's fairly easy to use, too.

Step 1: Download the software to your computer (the site I linked to should be safe)
Step 2: Run the setup program.
Step 3: Run the program.

OK.. those should have been fairly obvious.

When you run the program, you get a box with 2 windows in it.  Once you have found the video you want, copy and paste the URL into the top window and choose SAVE.  This will download the YouTube video to your computer (make sure you remember where you saved it).  Unfortunately, it's in a format we can't use at school (.flv for the geeks), so there is a second step.  Click on the ...folder icon to find the video you just downloaded (picture upcoming, when I'm at home).  Then choose CONVERT.  It will ask you what format you want to save as, and I've found that .wmv works the best.  Zap that file onto a flash drive, and you are good to show your video clips on a school computer.

Thing 8

So, there is my new heading (yay!).  Sadly, I can't find a selection that allows me to left-justify it, rather than centered.  Any ideas?  I wasn't able to do the Flickr spelling from a school computer, due to the following error.

I get the same error when I go to Twitter, and add "www.", instead of twitter.com.  What does the error mean?

Thing 7

I uploaded some DC pix to Flickr, and it seemed to go smoothly.  I run our school's DC trip and have used PhotoBucket instead of Flickr because of the upload limitation.  Photobucket doesn't have as many "fun" things, it looks like (like the mash-up). 

My problem with Flickr is the 150MB/ month upload.  Normally, this isn't a problem.  However, when you are doing a large batch upload, like I have to do from our DC trip, it is hard to work around.

I'm interested to see the MashUp stuff.

Thing 4/5 RSS Feeds

OK... I've seen the "feeds" icon in my favorites section of IE, but never got around to figuring it out.  Now that I've worked my way through it, I don't really see the big deal.  I guess I feel more comfortable, just bookmarking my favorites and being updated that way rather than through the feeds.  Maybe I'm a techno "old fart" but it's just the way that works better for me.

BTW, I've got to say that is really frustrating to try to do the 23 things at school when so much of it is dependent on watching videos, which are block for streaming.  I'd prefer to do it at school away from the home distractions, but unfortunately can't.  This is something that is a problem for us teaching with technology... When I can't link to a video, because the kids can't watch it, it eliminates a good educational portion of the Internet.  Any ideas for "legal" workarounds?

Twitter for Teachers

Last year, as the Twitter craze started cresting, I was thinking about the use of Twitter for a teacher.  I understand that the use of Twitter is an odd cat...  Do we really care as a people what Ashton Kutcher is doing at each point in time?  And don't even get me started on why Ashton kutcher is such a big deal anyway...

Regardless, for those who have been skeptical about Twitter, think of using it as a mass text message that can be accessed from any computer, or SmartPhone.  So last spring, I started using Twitter to send out homework updates.  The reception was met with a deafening silence.  I only had 6 followers by the end of the year, out of 120 students. 

However, the potential was still there, and starting a new year filled me with a renewed optimism, especially as news organizations, and even the Waterford School District started "tweeting" updates.  I convinced my team that Twitter was easy (necessary for my non-geek teammates) so they bought in, and we put a blurb in the team newsletter.  We also put our Twitter handles in any email that gets sent out to parents.

Everyday now, we post up a note about the homework & agenda for the day.  We have 54 out of 125 followers (not bad).  At the bottom of this blog you can see the kind of information we post to parents.  We run about 2/3 students & 1/3 parents as followers.

The problem is that, while we know who our followers are, we cannot tell how often they check.  I'm sure Twitter data will be forthcoming, but if there are other geeks out there who knkow a quick, easy and (most importantly) free way to do this, please comment below.

Thing 1 n 2

I guess I can see this blog as fulfilling 2 different purposes.  If I chose this to be just an "all about me" blog, I would tend towards techie ideas for teachers, like how to use Twitter, bit.ly & showing off the smartpen we've been using. 

If on the other hand, I use it for students...  Well, as an 8th grade physical science teacher, the only thing I can think of to use it for is a "kicking off" point for students.  For instance, read this article (with link) and comment your reaction to it.  It's an interesting theory to work in other links, but without the ability to link to any streaming media, or flash videos, it eliminates whole sections of the web that would certainly help students with reading difficulties.

Let's just say I'm keeping an open, yet somewhat skeptical mind....

Thing 0... The Beginning

Well here I am, the Geeker Teacher. My biggest problem has always been having something to write. As Joey once said, "It turns out I don't have that many thoughts." Hopefully this will keep me going with something interesting as thoughts pop in....